[Foundation-l] Chapter-selected Board seats - brainstorming

[daniwo59 at aol.com]

In a message dated 5/1/2008 4:18:27 PM Eastern Daylight Time,  
wknight8111 at gmail.com writes:
 
Ill go through this one item at a time:

A  million purposes. If a chapter raises money that it does not need,
the  simplest solution is to make a lump donation to the WMF. Or,
server  hardware could be purchased and donated, or used separately
(think  toolserver, which is owned and operated by WMF DE). 
Are you suggesting that instead of people donating to the WMF, they donate  
to WMF-Nebraska, which then funnels the money to WMF-Int'l. It seems like an  
unnecessary amount of work, two sets of books, and two sets of 
responsibilities:  donation receipts, etc. To be effective, you would want to minimize steps  
between the donor and the receiver, not add a middleman. 

A  local
chapter could similarly maintain servers for a variety of  tasks
(toolserving, hosting mirrors, hosting related sites like  wikizine,
wikinewsie.org, hosting a chapter homepage with information,  etc).
Who would take responsibility for maintaining these servers?
 


Johnny and I had an idea for purchasing a small fleet of used  laptops,
that we could use to teach underprivileged children how to use  wikis
and how to access free information.

That is a nice idea. 100 used laptops = $30,000. Then what? Were would you  
keep the laptops between gigs? Who would maintain them?


Similarly, we could print materials, like Wikipedia articles  or
Wikibooks, or Wikiversity materials, and distribute those  printed
books for free to underprivileged students.
Also a nice idea but no context and no consideration of costs, distribution  
channels, etc. 



Money can be used to host meetups, conferences, seminars and  other
public outreach events.

Money could be used to purchase the  rights to copyrighted educational
materials, for the express purpose of  re-releasing those materials
under a free license. These free materials  could then, in turn, be
used to seed books on Wikibooks, courses on  Wikiversity, articles on
Wikipedia, and sources on Wikisource.

Money  could be used to fund volunteers, such as supplying funding for
a volunteer  developer to implement specific software
features/extensions. Volunteer  authors and editors could earn grants
to write or edit important  educational resources on the various
projects. 
 
Paid editing? Would the community go for that?

Hell, we  could start a scholarship trust to help give money
to dedicated wikimedians  for college.

This is just the tip of the iceburg, a handful of things  that come off
the top of my head. Instead of asking what's the purpose for  raising
money, the better question is "can you imagine all  the
possibilities?".


I am not saying that these aren't good ideas per se, but they should be  much 
clearer if you are going to use them to raise money. And this will reflect  
on how (and if) money is raised, as well as on the mission of the chapter. To  
become a 501 (c) 3 in the US, you have to have a clear mission statement. Is 
the  mission, then, of the local chapter "To promote the use of free content  
materials and wikis, especially among underprivileged youth"? "To facilitate  
social interactions between contributors to Wikimedia projects"? "To acquire  
copyrighted materials to release into the public domain"? 
 
Consider the implications of each answer. 
 
BTW, I would suggest that an old US chapter list be revived for precisely  
this discussion. 
 
Danny



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